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Independent Website Uptime Verification

Release to Production Incorporates Independent Website Uptime Verification using Dotcom-Monitor

Summary

Industry: Managed hosting

Business Challenge: How to prove 100 percent availability and keep a unique brand promise Strategy: Using Dotcom-Monitor, provide clients with independent performance data that measures availability from a user’s perspective

Results:

Achievement of a higher standard of accountability

Higher client satisfaction

Increased client loyalty

When it comes to dedication, Seattle-based Release to Production (R2P Networks) is a loyal to its clients as a dog is to its owner. For most network-hosting solutions, five-nines reliability is good enough, but R2P Networks goes the extra distance by providing its clients with 100 percent uptime, and it backs it up with independent verification from Dotcom-Monitor.

“Businesses and organizations have a lot of hosting options, so we approach it from a customer perspective,” says Glen Kendell, network architect for R2P Networks. “ We ask ‘As a client, what would we expect? Is 99.999 percent availability really good enough? Why not 100 percent? That’s really what I want.’

– like the Labrador retriever on our home page, we’re completed dedicated. We offer a secured network- hosting solution for production-network systems. But more than private hardware, a secured data center and extensive support, we offer clients a business relationship based on verified trust,” he says.

Independent Monitoring Seamlessly Added to Premium Services

“When it comes to SLA management, the best way to ensure web performance and availability is to look at it from the end-users perspective,” Kendell says. “If internal monitoring shows servers up 100 percent of the time, but a user can’t connect, there’s a problem. We bundle external monitoring into our offering to ensure continuous availability.”

“ Dotcom-Monitor works great for guaranteeing uptime to our customers. Their scripting ability enables us to drill down into the web page to provide our customers monitoring data that accurately represents web access. Dotcom-Monitor is a key partner to ensure customer satisfaction.”

Glen Kendell Network Architect, Release to Production

R2P Networks utilizes Dotcom-Monitor as its independent web-performance-monitoring partner. W ith monitoring stations throughout the United States and in major business centers around the globe,

Dotcom-Monitor provides a wide range of website and network-monitoring services, which allow for customized monitoring environments for each R2P Networks client. Reports on availability and accessibility are emailed directly to their customers as verification of R2P Networks’s performance to 100- percent availability standard spelled out in its SLAs. For example, if the monitoring report indicates an unplanned downtime for a day, the client’s account is credited accordingly.

Dotcom-Monitor is the proof we use to show that we can do what we say we do,” says Kendell. “It goes straight to the integrity of our offer. We promise a higher standard, and our clients are grateful that we use Dotcom-Monitor as proof of our performance.”

Typically, R2P Networks uses Dotcom-Monitor to check on the availability of public (HTTP) and secured (HTTPS) websites. In some cases, R2P Networks uses Dotcom-Monitor’s ability to construct virtual “ devices” or groupings of online tasks to simulate more complex user experiences, such as logging on to a website, then logging into the secured portion of the site and filling out various online forms. R2P Networks’s typical SLA states that an unplanned outage occurs if more than two Dotcom-Monitor servers in remote locations cannot successfully log into the application and complete defined user tasks.

Transaction applications for eCommerce are monitored using Dotcom-Monitor’s scripting feature. The scripting feature enables each step in an online transaction to be recorded to mimic a real customer’s transaction. The script is played back from each of the remote Dotcom-Monitor facilities, at a choice of frequencies from every minute to every 15 minutes. Any difficulty in logging in and carrying out the transaction is flagged as an outage.

In addition to website monitoring, some of R2P Networks’s clients monitor email servers for performance and availability. Dotcom-Monitor sends email over SMTP gateway and then tries to retrieve it using POP3 or IMAP. If the expected mail message isn’t found within certain timeframe, the monitoring solution reports an error.

Report Cards Provide the Proof

R2P Networks uses Dotcom-Monitor’s Report Card feature to deliver the performance and availability information in neatly summarized reports. Dotcom-Monitor report cards are accessible outside of the Dotcom-Monitor service, which makes it easy for R2P Networks to provide its clients with real-time status, as well as daily, weekly and monthly statistics for performance and uptime.

Dotcom-Monitor Report Cards provide independent monitoring data with a high degree of reliability and quality. Both R2P Networks and its clients look at the same independently generated metrics to discuss R2P’s performance without ambiguity or disagreement.

Advanced Monitoring Key to Customer Satisfaction

Bundling Dotcom-Monitor’s services in with their managed services has enabled R2P Networks to offer a neutral way to ensure SLAs are being met, and it’s a distinct competitive advantage in the crowded managed-hosting arena. As an independent third-party, Dotcom-Monitor provides real-time performance monitoring from an external users perspective, providing R2P Networks with objective data. In addition, Dotcom-Monitor provides R2P Networks with instant notification when problems do occur so R2P Networks can immediately act to correct any issues and maintain the continuous availability of critical web- based business applications.

Maintaining website availability is one of the most important elements of customer satisfaction and profits. Partnering with Dotcom-Monitor lets R2P Networks tightly integrated monitoring into its core-product definition and how their services are presented and delivered.

R2P Networks knows its customers deserve 100% uptime and credit for any downtime, with independent results tracking. Dotcom-Monitor helps R2P Networks deliver on its brand promise to take dedication to the next level. That’s dedication!